Republicans in Congress: Are they really blocking bills that could help suffering Americans? April 20, 2018

(NATIONAL) – Salon.com has an interesting new piece out about what it calls “a troubling trend of Republican recalcitrance,” and one that is yet another signal of the “immense dysfunction” in the U.S. Senate.

“On his 100th day in office, President Trump congratulated himself for signing the most bills in that period of any president since Harry Truman — overlooking the substance, or lack thereof, of most of them. But by the end of Trump's first year, he had sunk down to signing the fewest bills for a first-year president since Dwight Eisenhower. After passing massive corporate tax cuts on a party-line vote late last year, the Party of No has grown even more obstructionist, refusing to compromise on a host of vitally important legislation, including bills that would directly benefit their own red-state constituents, "economic anxiety" and all,” says the story.

Like, for example a bill that would remove restrictions which make it virtually impossible for the DEA to freeze suspicious opioid shipments. The bill is stalled in the Senate. How dumb is that? “Opioid overdoses claimed 115 lives per day in 2016,” says the Salon story and what is really fascinating is that “a disproportionate number of those deaths occurred in Trump-supporting middle America, and as a 2016 candidate, Trump declared the nation’s drug problem a “national emergency."

But Trump has actually done very little about it other than, says the report “Nominating Rep. Tom Marino, R-Pa., as the nation's drug czar. It turned out that Marino had taken $134,000 in donations for his 2014 and 2016 re-election campaigns from the pharmaceutical industry, according to campaign finance website Open Secrets. He also sponsored the legislation that eventually resulted in pharmacies flooding small-town America with opioids. Marino eventually withdrew from consideration.”

Oh and it gets better. Senate Republicans are also “playing hardball with a bill that would put an end to taxpayer-funded workplace harassment settlements for politicians.”